The business of basketball is just as vast and cutthroat as the competition on the court. No one knows that better than legendary executive Sonny Vaccaro. The Godfather of Sneaker deals made his bones at Nike and later went on to work for Adidas. But he had an ugly exit from the latter, and it has to do with LeBron James.
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Vaccaro was famous for being the man who signed Michael Jordan to Nike in the 1980s. He didn’t just sign him. He bet Nike’s entire basketball budget on him, and it paid off in more ways than could ever be explained. MJ became a phenomenon and helped launch Nike to the No. 1 sports apparel brand, with an estimated worth of $107 billion.
However, Vaccaro’s path took a wild turn when he left Nike for Adidas in an attempt to compete against them. He was about to sign LeBron James to one of the most lucrative shoe deals in history. But that didn’t happen. He recalled why during a recent interview with GrowthX.
“I was forced not to tell the truth when Adidas screwed up on LeBron. They lied to me, and I quit. The best thing you can do, is tell the truth to the client, to the player. Do what you think,” he stated.
How did Adidas lie? Vaccaro’s pitch was to offer to LBJ $100 million, which Adidas agreed to. However, Adidas went back on their word and changed the numbers of their offer, adding in provisions for incentives, but at a much lower price. It swayed LeBron away, and Vaccaro quit after because they made him lie to not only James, but his mother, too.
“The other thing, even in the LeBron thing, if they would not have lied to me. But never in any negotiation did I say to anybody, ‘This is my maximum. I’m gonna give you $100 million,'” he later said in the GrowthX interview. He explained that doing that already puts the company into a corner that they cannot battle their way out of.
“You can’t put yourself in a corner. That’s what Converse did and Adidas did with Michael. ‘Well why not? We got Magic Johnson. We got this.’ They put themselves in that corner by saying we’re not going above them,” he added.
Adidas’s lack of awareness left billions of dollars out of their pocket. A move that Vaccaro himself would call “the dumbest single mistake anybody has ever made in the history of negotiating.” Looking at the numbers, he wasn’t wrong.
“Adidas lied to him. I couldn’t work for people that lied to somebody who I gave my word to,” stated Vaccaro in a separate interview with Scoop B. For a guy who hustled his way through with the gift of the gab, it’s kind of honorable to see him walk on a corporation whose dishonesty matched only their cheapness.
As for LeBron? He famously signed a $90 million deal with Nike before his NBA debut in 2003, turning down bigger offers because Nike helped him move his mom out of the hood. In 2015, he became the first athlete to land a lifetime deal with the brand, which is reportedly worth over $1 billion.
His signature line has dropped 22 shoes so far, earning him an estimated $30–44 million annually. More than a sneaker deal, it’s a long-term partnership that solidified LeBron as a global icon alongside Jordan.
